Latest revision as of 19:17, 5 April 2010

Meeting notes from 03.30 (taken by Christopher Lincoln)

Suggestions for improving launch quality and efficiency

- Need a standard process for setting up and testing electronics. This process must be well documented
- Preflight check list.
- Battery check
- Have ?Yay or Nay? call of the Tuesday meeting before the launch. For a ?Yay? call to be made, every critical component must be completed and tested.
- A full check list of what is going up with this launch and their dependencies
- Mark the tank as we open it, to alleviate confusion as to which one was used.
- Always take a second (back up) tank to each launch
- create wiki pages of each payload item, including set up instructions. (list of needed pages are on the bottom of this page.)
- Provide better communication for the drive out of the launch site
- locate stores in the area that can provide forgotten items like batteries and helium

List of tasks that we should do before the next launch

- Test different types of batteries in the freezer (both types of batteries and competing brands)
- acquire a bathroom scale to weigh the helium tanks with.
- Purchase condoms, extra large
- the cannon IS1100 stopped taking pictures shortly after being turned on, probably battery related, but we should test to make sure.

Ideas for next launch

- One battery grid to rule them all! This would consist of 2 battery systems that connected just prior to the component giving a back up system should one fail.
- add solar cells to the outside to the payload to test energy received as we go up. We can use the datalogger to store the information.
- Use a droid with debian installed (Chris has one) to feed data from a USB hub that had has several web cameras hooked up and save the data out to a USB harddrive. Alternatively we could also use a beagle board (Nils has one).
- Attach LED blinkies or stroke lights (from disposable cameras) to the end of the antenna support arms.
- Add a high pitch buzzer to the payload bus to help locate it
- add brightly colored inflated condoms (balloons will work also) to the payload so that they will float above the final resting place, assisting in locating it.
- Add a video camera, and stream it's feed over a ham radio to a base station. This would use a NTSC broadcast. This has the potential to be expensive, so Chris will gather - a cost estimate for this (both dollar and if possible weight)
- make the video camera steerable. Even outside of the flight this would be usable as we could then be able to see the area where the payload landed before having to walk there.

Ideas talked about, but decided to be considered independent of the core Spacebridge concept

- Generating Hydrogen quickly and cheaply. While awesome, it's to dangerous and inconvenient for us to focus on at the moment.
- UAV. Again awesome, but is a large enough project to be considered independent but closely related and potentially intersecting Spacebridge.